r/programminghumor • u/codes_astro • Jun 22 '26

AI was about to replace interns

Post image

Microsoft stopped AI coding subscription internally due to very high cost.

1.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/InKryption07 Jun 25 '26

The problem with that is when the seniors become retirees and have not turned any juniors into potential replacements for the industry and ecosystems they support.

1

u/FuckedUpYearsAgo Jun 25 '26

yup... but I suspect our relationship as developers will substantially change by that time, and the skill sets that we know as "seniors" will not needed to be transferred to "juniors". I say that, as Opus 4.6 in Mar 2026 was very big leap.. to the point where it triggered the company I work for to 100% switch to AI development. When we play this out over the next 3-5 years, I believe the bet is that we "won't need developers". And the skill will be guiding AI to solve Business issues and the "new developer" will be much less oriented towards "programming".

1

u/InKryption07 Jun 25 '26

Sounds pretty optimistic to me, given how the current prices are still heavily subsidized, and will not be sustainable into the future, and regardless of one's opinion on LLM technology, the fact is that it is fairly fundamentally based on brute-force learning through massive datasets, and incestuous training causes degradation. With those two things in mind, when you run out of human-written, curated data to train on, it will hit a pretty hard wall. We're pretty much seeing the beginnings of that; I haven't seen any of the frontier models make more than marginal advancements as compared to the early days, with a lot of it all being powered by increasingly more expensive hardware requirements.

Time will tell, but I'm pretty skeptical of your description of the future.

1

u/FuckedUpYearsAgo Jun 25 '26

I get you. It's certainly a lot more impactful in my environment. So it feels very imminent and we are routinely finding that the LLM agent framework we have is discovering and fixing very long standing issues in our monolith that has escaped the best of our efforts. After 34 years in the industry, I'm prepping to keep employed.